


in another time in another castle

by caseyvalhalla



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 14:49:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7938658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caseyvalhalla/pseuds/caseyvalhalla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one grows up without regrets.</p>
<p>But time moves in cycles, winds back on itself, and sooner or later that kid you used to play video games with is gonna reappear just in time to ruin your day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in another time in another castle

**Author's Note:**

> I collaborated on this piece with the eternally amazing Nijuuni, who was instrumental in developing the story and suggesting edits and improvements. The completed fic owes its polish to her insight, and of course to the tireless efforts of my beta adulterclavis, who overcame moving house and painting-related injuries to help me wrap things up.
> 
> [You can see the gorgeous art that Erin created to accompany this here.](http://nijuukoo.tumblr.com/post/149520799282/my-art-half-of-caseyvalhallas-fan-fic-for)
> 
> So without further ado, here is one last hurrah to the akuroku fandom from me, with love.

“I’m gonna go get some coffee.”

Roxas can barely hear himself over the drone of voices echoing around the exhibit hall, so it’s no surprise that Pence can’t either, bent as he is with his nose buried in the guts of a Commodore 64.  They don’t have a lot in the way of merchandise, just a small rack of refurbished consoles and peripherals stacked against the back curtain that Roxas finished setting up in a matter of minutes before devoting his time to the demo station next to their pile of business cards.  Now they've got a CRT monitor sputtering with static proving that their refurbs do, in fact, work; currently an Atari 1040 ST is humming away, the intro to Time Bandit looping back on itself and a joystick available to anyone with doubts.

He's spent the ensuing two hours talking to exactly three people, though, and he’s already tired, wriggling his nose under the black frames of his glasses, and leans back in his chair just enough to reach out and prod at Pence’s shoulder with one finger.

“Uh? What?”  Pence surfaces from the Commodore like a diver coming up for air.

“Coffee.”

“Oh, right.  Gotcha.  Check the other vendors while you’re up, see if there’s anything good.”

“Like there’s anything you don’t already have.”  Roxas grabs his wallet and phone from under the table and shoves both into their respective pockets.  “I’ll keep an eye out.  Don’t get lost in the logic board.”

Pence waves one hand at him with a vague, dismissive noise, already back under; hopefully he’ll notice if a customer stops by.

Beyond the blue polyester curtain separating their booth from the ones around it the exhibition center is a slow shuffle of bodies, vintage-distressed t-shirts as far as the eye can see set against the steady background noise of 8-bit and the pervasive smell of old computers, like some combination of magnetic dust and slowly decaying plastic.  Roxas weaves around the edges until he reaches the coffee stand in the entry hall, tapping at his phone while he waits in line because there’s nothing better to do but catch something like five Pidgeys until the guy behind the counter mispronounces the name on his frap.

It’s not a great day.  Not terrible, either, Roxas supposes, edging back into the main exhibition space and wandering through the causeways of booths.  He and Pence hadn’t really expected to get much attention compared to the people selling rare and mint copies of otherwise impossible to find games.  Their products aren’t particularly hard to come by, and they’re comparatively pretty young to be in the retrocomputing business, repairing machines that were manufactured years before either of them were born.  Pence ran it as a side gig to his camera shop; Roxas figured he was in it for the nostalgia, maybe.  Or the satisfaction of taking something that was old and supposedly dead, forgotten, blowing the dust off of it and slowly, carefully bringing it back to life.

There’s no feeling quite like knowing that nothing ever really disappears.

Roxas edges his way from one vendor to the next with a discerning eye and the straw of his frap between his teeth, quickly passing over the plastic tubs full of games that are only one or two generations old.  There’s a market for them, sure, but there’s nothing he wants that’s new or easy to come by.  He lingers longer at the booths with vintage software and cartridges, pawing through a few bins and considering an iteration of Donkey Kong that he probably already has on a different system.

He considers it long enough that the other people at the booth move on, and when he looks up he sees it: black cartridge propped on its own display easel, glossy mint-quality label reflecting the fluorescent lights.  His own personal ultimate find.  The holy grail.

“Clocktower.”

Roxas doesn’t quite realize he’s spoken out loud, reading the cheery yellow font arched across an alien landscape with multiple moons, two figures standing before the game’s namesake, punctuated by the copyright line.  He reaches out like he can’t quite believe it’s real, fingers curling around the textured plastic edges of the cartridge.

_“This is really old,” Roxas said, both arms wrapped around the backrest of a creaking office chair, legs tucked up beneath it so it spun slightly under its own power whenever he moved.  “Can’t we get a Nintendo 64?  That’s what all the kids at school have.”_

_“If all the kids at school have one, wouldn’t it be boring to be just the same?” his dad asked, wiping the dust off the blue and black console he’d just dug out of one of the cabinets lining the utility closet that doubled as what Roxas’s parents called the ‘computer room.’  Roxas was dubious about both the name and the contents, which were mostly ancient machines that he wasn’t sure even worked, piled around equally ancient boxes of software and an overloaded desk, with only the barest remaining space for a chair.  “Only a few hundred people in the entire world own one of these.  Isn’t that cooler than a Nintendo?”_

_“Not really,” Roxas muttered, but either his dad didn’t hear him or graciously pretended not to._

_The console plugged into an equally ancient television with a knob and no remote and a joystick with a single button, and Roxas’s dad pushed him and his chair up to the desk once the screen was slowly fading on to static.  He crouched beside Roxas, a black cartridge in his hand with a colorful label.  “Okay, maybe it’s not as cool as a Nintendo, but this game is the best game ever.  You have to fight bad guys and solve puzzles, and if you run into trouble, you can go back in time and try again.”_

_“That makes it too easy!”_

_“But every time you go back, the hands on the clocktower move forward.”  His dad’s voice dropped into a dramatic monotone, and he made a sweeping gesture before plugging the cartridge into its slot.  “And when it reaches midnight…”  He gave a mock gasp, and flipped the power switch on._

_Roxas’s mouth curled into a pout.  “What?”_

_“Well, you have to play it and find out.  Here, take the joystick.  Press the button for player one… and for player two, we’ll pick the computer.”_

_Roxas fumbled over the unfamiliar controls, not realizing the joystick made the cursor move faster the harder he pushed it.  “What does that do?”_

_“It makes the computer your friend.”  His dad tapped on the second icon on the screen, a tiny, vaguely humanoid figure.  “And it’ll help you fight and solve puzzles.”_

_It means the computer is my friend, Roxas thought each time he powered on the old console and the old tv and brushed away the dust that invariably clung to everything.  He didn’t think about how there was no actual friend to play the second character, and he didn’t think about how the utility room was the farthest room in the house from the kitchen, which meant when his parents were fighting, they were far enough away to be drowned out by the tinny 8-bit music._

Another hand curls around the other side of the cartridge at the same time as Roxas’s.

Roxas looks up—and then looks up slightly more, and there’s a gangly redheaded hedgehog in front of him that he thinks he recognizes from the corporate booth where all the speed runners and let's players have been congregating.  He’s wearing a Konami shirt which might or might not be ironic and a yellow argyle-patterned scarf, which probably means he’s Team Instinct on top of everything else.  His hair is firetruck red and _heavily_ styled to the point Roxas can’t tell if it’s a scene thing or a punk thing or he really is just that into Sonic.

Roxas honestly cannot come up with a single intelligent thing to say in response to coming face to face with someone so.  _This_.

Fortunately or unfortunately, _this_ is perfectly capable of vocalizing his own concerns.  “Hey.  Come on, man, I was here first.”

Roxas bristles immediately, dredging up every ounce of pretense in his entire (admittedly smaller) body.  “Do you even know what this is?  Because if you did you’d know it’s a proprietary release for the Shadowvision 800 and there are only around fifty known working systems in the world.  I guarantee that no one is playing this on Youtube.”

The redheaded hedgehog’s eyes narrow, and yes that’s definitely eyeliner—really clean, well drawn eyeliner, but Roxas isn’t about to be impressed by _anything_.  “Don’t gatekeep me, kid.  I know what it is.”

“Do you?”

“It’s a two-player co-op action puzzler with one hundred known levels and a built-in time hack that progressively calls up five tiers of boss battles, depending on how much you use it.”

“Fine.”  Roxas shoves at his glasses with his free hand, unwilling to let go of the cartridge for even a second.  “Then do you actually have a Shadowvision 800 to play it on?”

Redhead’s mouth turns down in a vaguely dangerous scowl.  “No.”

“Then what’s the point of buying it?”  Roxas lifts the cartridge and Redhead tenaciously keeps hold of the other side, bringing it close enough to both of them that the orange price sticker is clearly visible.  “You’re going to spend this much money on a game you can’t even play?”

“It’s important to me.”

Roxas opens his mouth to shoot back _it’s important to me, too!_  Because of course it was.  Of course it’s important to both of them, if they’re both willing to argue about it to begin with, if they’re both willing to pay out the nose for a single cartridge for a niche console that’s only rare because it failed miserably on the market.  They’re collectors; the entire point of collecting is nostalgia and sentimentality, holding onto a piece of something that represents a moment in time that can never be relived.

He’s not sure at first why the words die in his throat; something about the redhead’s expression is nagging at the back of his mind, some unsettling sense of deja vu tugging the muscles in his shoulders taut.

_“You can’t just leave!”_

_“I don’t want to,” Roxas said, voice rising in time with the boy grimacing over his head, at least an inch taller already than when they first met.  “No one asked me what I wanted!  Not about any of this!”_

_He was eight years old when his mom sat down on the floor in his room and explained to him what the word ‘divorce’ meant.  That she had gotten a new job in another town, and that his dad had gotten a new job also, in a different town, and that he would move away with his mom and would visit his dad in the summer.  He remembered feeling confused at first, and then angry, for no reason he understood.  Angry all the time, at everyone and everything._

_“It’s not fair.”  The other boy’s tank top was yellow, clashing with the carrot-red hair that stuck out in all directions, too sunny for the hurt clouding his face.  “We’re best friends!  You’re not supposed to leave!”_

_“Shut up!”  Roxas was so tired, so angry, so done with people telling him what had to happen with his own life, deciding what he should and shouldn’t do like what he felt and what he wanted didn’t matter.  “It’s not like anyone else would miss me!”_

“Axel,” Roxas says, and isn’t surprised when the redhead’s only reaction is a twitch in his jaw.

It’s definitely him, though—the freckles down his arms and across his cheeks are the same, his hair is longer and redder but at least he found a use for how unruly it was.  He’s still taller than Roxas, like he couldn’t stand to stop growing on the off chance that Roxas might catch up.  It’s bizarre, though, seeing someone he only knew as a child standing in front of him as an adult.  Roxas lifts the glasses off of his nose, tucking them back on top of his head, and Axel clicks his tongue.

“It _is_ you under there.  Can you see the chalkboard these days?”

“At least now I don’t have to depend on anyone else to take notes for me,” Roxas shoots back.

There’s an uncomfortable silence between them, electric tension coiling in the air like static.  Roxas isn’t sure how to feel, whether to get angry and dump the last fifteen years’ worth of resentment on Axel’s head or whether to bat aside that ball of tension, forget everything that had gone horribly wrong hovering between them, and hug him.

Before he can settle on either one, the cartridge in his hand disappears and both of them comically jerk their heads around in unison, flabbergasted, fingers suddenly empty.  The girl behind the counter scowls, waving the cartridge out of reach and slipping it into a box under the counter.  “If you’re going to fight over it, do it somewhere else.  You’re ruining my business.”

Roxas blinks and looks around, finally noting that they’re blocking half the booth, that there’s a knot of people eyeballing them like they expect violence, others carefully giving them and the booth a wide berth as they pass.  Axel hisses somewhere over his head and turns abruptly, waving one hand and stalking back to his booth.  “Whatever.”

_Whatever._  Roxas is so infuriated by the tone that for a few seconds he just stands there, fuming, but the girl is still glaring at him and people are still staring, so he grabs up the remainder of his frap and turns in the opposite direction, shoulders hunched, not caring about the merch around him anymore so much as getting back to his booth as fast as possible.

Amazingly, Pence pops up from behind his soldering iron immediately when Roxas appears, perfectly sunny and unassuming.  “Hey, guess what!  We got a bid on the Atari already and two job offers—Roxas?”  He blinks, watching his friend wriggle back behind the table and plunk into his chair, scowling.  “Something wrong?”

“Axel’s here.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.  One of the dealers has a copy of Clocktower.”

Pence’s eyes bulge.  “Holy crap, are you serious?  And you didn’t get it?”

“I was going to, but Axel grabbed it at the same time as me and wanted to fight over it so the dealer 86’d us.”  Roxas’s arms are crossed, slumped down in the chair and sulking like someone half his age, talking around the frappucino straw still in his mouth.

“Who’s Axel?  Whatever, want me to go get it for you?  You’re not gonna find another copy of that thing in a million years.”

“Forget it.”

Pence actually backs away, startled, like he’s not sure who he’s talking to anymore, like Roxas has suddenly sprouted horns and wings and breathed fire.

Roxas, of course, hasn’t changed at all; he just can’t stop thinking about Axel turning and walking away like this unexpected reunion was inconsequential, like he couldn’t care less about the opportunity to talk to Roxas again and maybe give him the chance to apologize.

He feels guilty, and it hurts.

Pence follows his stare from the nearly empty Starbucks cup to the box sitting half-hidden by the tablecloth—to the Shadowvision 800 Roxas had restored himself years ago, that they dragged to every trade show they went to in the tri-state area and he continually refused to sell, despite the incredible asking price he could get for it.

“Look.”  Pence scoots his chair back, hands on his knees, voice hesitant.  “I don’t know what just happened, but I do know how much this means to you, so I’m gonna go get that game.  Whenever you’re out of this funk you can pay me back.  For now just watch the booth, okay?  Don’t scare anyone off.”

Roxas makes a noise of agreement and Pence sighs before shuffling out of the booth, probably leaving as much to give Roxas and his personal thundercloud some space as to go spend his own money buying his friend’s Holy Grail.  And it works, because after a few minutes of silence Roxas can’t be angry anymore and downgrades to frustrated and sad.

Screw that guy—if he doesn’t want to talk about it, then fine.  Sometimes things really are too old to be fixed, and maybe it’s for the best that he moved on.  Roxas pulls the box out from under the table and sets it on top, flipping the cardboard cover open.

_“Woah, that’s so cool!”_

_Roxas didn’t expect the redheaded kid from his class to actually be excited about his dad’s old console.  It’s not cool like a Nintendo, just flat and boxy, black with blue accents and perpetually dusty.  The office chair wasn’t quite big enough to hold both of them, so they each had one foot on the floor, pushing it side to side between them._

_Axel wasn’t the sort of person Roxas imagined being friends with, but he never really had a good idea of how best friends were supposed to work.  He sat in the back of the classroom and the desk next to him was empty, and one morning the teacher announced there was a student switching classes.  Suddenly Axel was his neighbor, and Axel talked a lot and got them in trouble, but he also let Roxas copy his notes because he couldn’t see the whiteboard, so Roxas decided he was okay._

_“I usually play with the computer,” Roxas said.  He thought about explaining what his dad said about the computer being his friend, but Axel was already out of the chair and rummaging through the boxes under the desk._

_He made a triumphant noise, after a few minutes, and emerged to plop back into the chair next to Roxas, dust smudged on his nose, a second joystick in his hands._

_“Now we can play together!”_

Roxas feels an uncomfortable prickle run up his arms and looks from side to side, not seeing anyone who might have approached the booth until he pushes the lid of the box back down and tilts his head back with a scowl for the second time that day.

“What do you want?”

Axel is looking down at him with that same terse, not quite angry expression as before.  “I heard from another vendor that someone at this booth had a Shadowvision 800.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“But it works, right?”

Roxas opens his mouth to say of course, to demand why the hell he cares anyway, when his eyes dart downwards for a moment just so he doesn’t have to stare back into that expression for a fraction of a second, and he sees Axel’s hand clutched around a cartridge.  “Did you—”

Axel raises his hand slightly and lowers it, and has the grace to look guilty.

“You went back after I left and sniped it!”  Roxas’s shoulders are shaking, teeth clenched.  “Do you really hate me that much?”

“If I did, do you think I’d go through so much trouble to get _this_ game?”  Axel held up the cartridge for emphasis, waving in in the air between them.  “Are you going to let me test it or not?”

Roxas doesn’t quite hear the last part, because something under the cellophane wrapper catches his eye, and without thinking he grabs Axel’s wrist to hold it still.

Of course, Axel instinctively jerks away.  “Hey!”

“Look,” Roxas says, and turns the back of the cartridge towards him.

Axel frowns, thumb smoothing down the cellophane so the glare from the overhead lights doesn’t block the label art, which is identical front and back.  But on the back, he sees the same thing Roxas did—the black crayon scribbles, the smiley faces drawn over the two moons in the background.

_“These two are us,” Axel explained, holding up the Clocktower cartridge and pointing at the two silhouetted figures in the foreground.  “But you can’t see our faces.”_

_“So we should add them.”  Roxas slipped out of the office chair and ran back to his room to retrieve a rattling plastic pencil box.  If his dad noticed later that they’d defaced his game, he didn’t say anything, at least not to Roxas.  After all, they’d only drawn on the back side, so of course, as his childish logic followed, no one would care._

_And it was important to know that this game was their game, in case it got lost._

The silence that follows is heavy, while Axel stares at the label and Roxas folds his arms over his chest, anger draining away.  “My dad took all of his stuff when my parents split.  He was always broke so he sold everything on ebay at some point.”

Axel glances down at the closed box.  “So that’s not…”

“No, I found this at a thrift store a few years ago and refurbished it.”

“Ah.”  Axel shifts awkwardly on his feet, holding the cartridge in both hands, still staring at it awestruck.  “Still, what are the chances.  I mean, if the internal battery isn’t dead, it might still have our saved game on it.”

Roxas feels something in his chest give way, like he’d been holding his breath and finally let it out.  To his right, the Atari ST is still looping the Time Bandit demo on its monitor.

Cautiously, but with a familiar thread of nostalgia coiling in his stomach, he flips the Shadowvision’s box back open.  “Let’s check it out.”

  


Of course, on arrival at the vendor, Pence discovers that the game he’d come to retrieve had just been sold, and his heart promptly drops into his feet.  He hadn’t figured something that niche would have such a high demand, but collectors were collectors, and he wanders into the exposition center’s food court in search of something for lunch that might soften the blow.

But when he arrives back at his booth with a Goodwood bag in hand he discovers that his seat has been appropriated by a lanky redhead, he and Roxas both bent over a pair of blue and black joysticks.  At least when they appropriated the monitor they also packed the Atari ST away properly, he supposes.

“Suddenly I smell barbecue—oh, hi there.”  The redhead looks up over his shoulder and Roxas hisses immediately.

“Watch what you’re doing!”

“Sorry, jeez.”

There’s a weird sort of tension prickling around the two of them, and Pence isn’t sure how to define it, so he ducks back out to find another chair and debates whether to puzzle out what’s going on or just roll with it.  Either way, apparently Redhead was both the guy Roxas had argued  with over the game earlier _and_ the guy who beat Pence to the vendor to buy it.

“You need to go to the left,” Roxas snaps just as Pence wriggles back into the booth with a third chair.  The graphics on the screen are blocky but colorful, what looks like a side-view platformer with two figures moving around.

“I _am_ on the left.”

“To the left where that switch is—dammit, Axel.”

“There’s no sense getting to the left switch when you’re not at the one on top and there are still enemies coming.”

“Let me figure out the top switch, just go to where I need you to be.”

“You can’t get up there and fight off all the baddies by yourself, Rox.”

“Don’t call me that!  And yes I can.”

“No, you can’t!  Stop trying to take on everything yourself and let me help you!”

Pence clears his throat at that very telling line of argument and the word PAUSE spreads across the screen, Roxas glaring sparks over his shoulder.  Pence stares back at him evenly.  “How about a barbecue break, guys.”

Roxas opens his mouth to argue but before any sound can come out, Axel happily flips his chair around and drops the joystick on the table.  “I am here for barbecue.”

“Good thing I got extra, apparently.”  Pence shrugs—he doesn’t actually mind, he’s just not sure what’s going on, and it’s no better five minutes later when Roxas is chewing murderously on his pulled pork sandwich and Axel doesn’t seem to notice or care.  “So uh… how do you two know each other?”

“Third grade,” Roxas grunts.

“That long ago, huh.”

Axel looks uneasy for a moment but that doesn’t seem to stop his mouth.  “Wouldn’t have been so long if Rox here knew how to use a phone.”

“I hear they work in both directions,” Roxas shoots back without missing a beat, crumpling his sandwich wrapper for emphasis.

“Oh, you mean like mail?  Kind of hard to call a number I don’t know, but at least I had an address.  Or did you just burn my letter as soon as you got it?”

“You only sent _one_.”

“I expected you to write back,” Axel says in a tone like dropping a lead weight.  “Because that’s how conversations work.”

Roxas is looking at his toes, both hands clutched around the crumpled wrapping, and Pence suddenly feels like an intruder on a scarily intimate argument.  He finishes his own food, collecting trash briskly and turning his chair back to face the C64-in-progress.  “I’ll just stay over here and let you two get back to your game.”

There’s something more vulnerable about the tension hovering over them when they turn back to the console, and as much as Pence tries not to eavesdrop he can’t block his ears.

“Why didn’t you write back?”

“I don’t know.  I guess I thought it’d be easier that way.”

Axel clicked his tongue, but the lightness in his voice disperses the stormcloud hovering over them and even the 8-bit music sounds more pleasant.  “You’re a pain in the ass, you know that, Roxas?”

“Yeah.”

Pence doesn’t think any of that exchange constitutes an apology or forgiveness, but they both sound like they’re smiling, anyway.

  


A small gaggle of onlookers has congregated around the little retrocomputing booth by the time Roxas and Axel open the door to the final boss at the top of the Clocktower at roughly the time that the exhibition hall is supposed to be closing for the night, but whoever is in charge doesn’t seem to care enough to shoo everyone out.  Roxas’s palms are sweating, the joystick’s textured plastic sticky under his hands, but he ignores that and the strain in his wrists and the tittering audience with their phones held up in favor of Axel’s voice.

“I’ve got this, get the next panel while I hold him off.”

As with all the bosses in Clocktower, the heroes have to fight the monster while solving a puzzle, this one involving lighting up panels in a certain order, which works both to cause laser damage and summon one of five shards that unlock the final door.

A few hours ago this would have been impossible, but sometime after Pence’s barbecue break they found a rhythm, falling into beat with each other the same way they had when they were kids, like no time had passed at all.  Roxas’s focus is intent, knowing that if they fail to clear this last room they’ll have to use the time function, which will throw an even harder boss at them before giving them a chance to beat this guy again.  It could take hours, and the trade show organizers are not that patient.

“I got it,” Roxas said under his breath, grabbing one of the shards from the dungeon floor, pulse quickening when he realizes it’s the last one.  “I got it!  The last piece, Axel!”

“Get to the door, to the door!”  Axel’s character races across the screen, drawing the monster’s attention, health meter running dangerously low.  “I got this, just go!”

_“We’re friends now,” Axel said, somewhere near his ear, but Roxas didn’t dare look away from the screen.  “That means you can trust me.”_

_“But you’ll get hurt!”_

_“I’ll be fine, because I know you’ll finish the puzzle before the bad guys get me.  That means I trust you, too.”_

Roxas’s thumb fumbles over the fire button, character jerking along with the joystick.  “Don’t die, okay?”

“Not today, Rox.”

His thumb hits the button and the screen freezes, and for a second everyone present holds their breath.  Then beams of light shoot out from the monster, graphics trembling dramatically, and it bursts into a spray of pixels.

Roxas shoots to his feet and practically flings the joystick, arms high in the air, and is hardly surprised to see Axel in the exact same pose.  Their palms slap together, some of the onlookers reach across the table to clap their shoulders, and the pleasant buzz of accomplishment in his nerves dulls everything else for a few minutes.  He misses the part where the audience disperses and the lights dim and Pence starts packing up the booth, watching the credits crawl across the screen.

“That was amazing,” Axel says, still at his elbow.  “Thanks, for… yeah.”  He gestures towards the console without elaborating.

“Yeah,” Roxas echoes, feeling weird but not upset.  He’s not sure what’s going to happen after this precise moment, but whatever it is, he’s okay with it.

So maybe what he feels is closure.

Axel scratches the back of his head, a familiar gesture.  “I better get back to my booth and help them clean up, so uh…”

“Oh.”  Roxas reaches for the console and the game slotted inside, crayon scrawls grinning at him from the label.

Axel’s hand stops him before he can flip the power button.  “Keep it.”

“What?”

“It’s your game, anyway.  Just keep it.”

“At least let me pay for half—”

“Nope.”  Axel claps him on the shoulder once, hard enough his entire body shakes.  “See you around, Rox.”

He disappears through the blue curtains before Roxas can react appropriately or protest further, and after a few minutes of standing awkwardly with his hands raised, he starts helping Pence pack their merchandise into the crates under the table.

“So that’s it, huh?” Pence comments after a few minutes, like he’s trying to push Roxas to talk.

“I guess.”

“You’re satisfied to just leave things like that?”

Roxas shrugs, stacking the crates onto the dolly so they can be wheeled out to the parking garage.  Somewhere behind him the song playing over the end credits stops and the menu screen music starts up.  “Not sure what else to do, I guess.”

“Ask him to dinner?”

Roxas scoffs a little, but it’s good natured, and Pence chuckles in response, then tugs on his elbow.

“If not dinner, maybe you should ask about _that_.”

Pence is pointing to the screen, where the 8-bit version of the cover art is spread over a short text menu, but something is different.  Roxas leans in, one hand tipping the joystick slightly to scroll through the options.

Start new game, load saved game, “Advanced level co-op mode,” Roxas and Pence read aloud at the same time, then turn slowly to look at each other.

Roxas doesn’t even bother with the blue curtains, just hops directly over the table and runs across the hall to where he vaguely remembers Axel’s booth being.  After three false positives he almost panics, but fortunately Axel is tall, and his hair is like a banner in the middle of all the blue polyester, and Roxas catches him just before he can disappear out a side door with a plastic bin in his arms.

“Unlockable,” he blurts out, and fortunately that’s enough to make Axel pause.  “We enabled something, some kind of advanced mode or new game plus.”

“For real?”

“Yeah.”  Roxas catches his breath, both hands on his knees, and feels something warm like laughter bubbling up from his stomach.  “Wanna help me beat it?  I’ll, uh.  I’ll take you out to dinner first.”

“Nah,” Axel says, and for an instant Roxas’s heart drops into his feet, but when he looks up Axel is grinning like the goofy face he drew on their game cartridge.  “We’ll just order a pizza.”


End file.
